Tennis Club

Tonight I rallied with the best tennis player I've ever played against. The previously best was one of the top woman in my county who happened to be a friend of mine - she was pretty good, a scholarship player at UW.

During college, one of my close friends was a top youth tennis player and supposedly awesome and in all likelihood, probably better than even the guy tonight, but alas, we never hit - he had grown to hate tennis and I didn't play at all during college.

This guy hit the tennis ball like I kick the soccer ball with someone that can't kick. I could see that whatever I hit at him (and I can hit pretty well sometimes), he wouldn't even flinch and return it so easily that it made it seem as if I had just lobbed him a ball instead of smacking it as hard as I could. When hit the ball his hardest my racquet nearly popped out of my hand when I tried to return it. I'm not joking, it happened several times. The spin on his forehand was monsterous.

It turned out he was in grad school at USC and he played in college at UC Riverside. So that's a D1 player. He didn't look like a great athlete, but man, his strokes were wicked.

So while hitting, I did the only logical thing - asked him how he hit his forehard so goddamn hard. He showed me the technique - called the winshield wiper forehand, the forehand that Federer hits. Instead of taking a big sweeping back swing and hitting through the ball, one takes a half swing back and whips with your wrist and forearm over the top of the ball, throwing all your body through it. Apparently, it's borrowed from martial arts!?! It's fairly revolutionary, I think, because it's a lot faster than a regular forehard, and the results - well, they speak for themselves. The difficulty is that it requires very specific timing and it can't hit it right, the ball sails into the net a lot.

Learn something new everyday...